Streaming series review: Vanina

Vanina: Season One ***1/2 (out of 5) This light Italian police procedural is designed for those who seek a higher ratio of character development to crime solving in their entertainment choices. Vanina (Giusy Buscemi, who looks nothing like Steve, thankfully) is an attractive thirtysomething who heads a homicide unit in Catania. Seven months before the series begins, she’d moved there from Palermo, where she’d been an anti-Mafia superstar and paramour of leading prosecutor Paolo (Giorgio Marchesi) until there was more heat from the Mafiosi in her professional and personal “kitchen” than she could stand. Vanina had witnessed her beloved dad being whacked by them when she was 15, and sensed her success was getting her and Paolo too large of a reboot risk. So she moved away from love and career arc to find an emotionally manageable substitute.

The four two-hour episodes of Season One are separate cases, with unfolding subplots and character arcs for most of the cast. The first case began with poisoned ice cream and the death of their equivalent of our Ben and Jerry. In the second, the remains from a 50-year-old murder are suddenly discovered, leading to serious present-day consequences. The third swirls around criminal activity by a criminal lawyer for other criminals, including the Mafia. The fourth begins with the murder of an international businessman who had more dubious connections than any one person should have.

But the plots are relatively unimportant, compared to the stories of the players. Vanina is torn between her lingering love for Paolo, and a new potential romance with an almost unbelievably empathic doctor, Manfredi (Corrado Fortuna). One of her detectives, Marta, (Paola Giannini) is interesting enough to warrant her own spinoff. Others have an assortment of personal issues and crises sufficient to stuff a telenovela.

All of these substories would have been too soapy for my taste but for the excellent casting, performances and quality of the writing. The more time we spend with them, the more we like and care about them. And this is coming from a guy with little patience for melodrama. The scripts are by Leonardo Marini, based on books by Cristina Cassar Scalia. The mysteries are typically complicated, with solutions that are mostly elusive enough for suspense. Less comic relief than other Sicily-based series I've reviewed like Makari or Detective Montalbano. No nudity or prolonged sex scenes, but relatively generous on eye candy for TV fare – especially in the first episode. Although the cops brandish guns frequently, I don’t recall a single shot being fired. The murders occur off-camera, and views of the stiffs are minimal.

The Sicilian locations provide a diverse range of lovely enhancements to the action therein. No cliffhangers, but some significant unresolved plot points beg for a Season Two. Since this just aired abroad in 2024, it seems quite likely that more is yet to come, which I will welcome if and when that happens.

(Vanina: Season One, in Italian with subtitles, streams on MHz Choice as of 9/16/25)